


A Soldier on Skaro

by mary_pseud



Series: Damnatio Memoriae [13]
Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Don't copy to other sites, F/M, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-01
Updated: 2019-06-06
Packaged: 2020-04-06 03:27:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19054309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mary_pseud/pseuds/mary_pseud
Summary: An ordinary Kaled soldier in a most extraordinary time: the end of the Thousand Year War.  From the battlefield to the bedroom, nothing will ever be the same.  Set on the AU post-war Skaro of the Damnatio Memoriae series.





	1. War

(Note: This is a transcription of an oral reminiscence. Dialect and trench language has been left intact to reserve the historical accuracy of the document. {break} indicates a pause or break in the original recording.)

My name's Trilt.

I was born in the Kaled Dome. Nothin' special about me, I was just a Standard baby, which meant my whole life was planned for me right from the start. Train to be a soldier, and then be a soldier, and then die a soldier. The Kaleds had been at war for a thousand years: that's why everyone had to stay in the Dome, except for the soldiers. The ground and the water and the air outside was poison. Nothin' lived outside except Mutos and monsters.

My first memory, I was with a bunch of other boys, and we were runnin' around and around and around in a circle. And there were grown-ups watching us, Teachers; huge they seemed to me, giants. They'd said that the boy who ran the hardest and the longest would get extra food that night, and everyone else would get half-rations. So we ran until we couldn't breathe, until our feet hurt like bein' pounded flat, until we collapsed. I wasn't the first to collapse, but I wasn't the last either: so I went hungry that night, and lay awake in bed, listenin' to the other boys' stomachs growl as well.

Every day I could remember in the Children's Barracks was like that. They tested you and they trained you, and if you failed they punished you. I was always with boys about the same age as me, I thought. I never saw anyone else, except for the Teachers. They taught us and they gave rewards or punishment. And that's all we cared about. Rewards and punishment. Gettin' one, and not gettin' the other.

And sometimes there was no food, or no water; sometimes even the air was all thick and rotten-smellin'. You'd lie in your bed, conservin' oxygen they called it, breathin' in little sips and wonderin' if the air would ever come back.

All my life was just trainin'. You ran every step, worked until you fell, grabbed sleep whenever you could. You had to know the Approved Words, and be ready to read them off from little cards the Teachers carried. You had to be ready to fight, all the time. Fight the Teachers, fight other boys, and someday, fight the Thals.

The Thals: those were the enemy. They say the baby-tenders used to go aroun' where the babies are kept, whisper "Thal", and then pinch 'em. Hard. So they'd always remember the word and pain, together. That's sure what it felt like every time I heard the word: like a sharp pain all through me. They were the enemy, and if we didn't destroy them, they would destroy us.

I had a friend back then, named Plob, and he had green eyes. That's all I remember now, not his face, just his eyes. He didn't make it: died in training, threw himself over a hurdle and broke his neck. I didn't find out then, though: it wasn't until a lot later. They never told you when somebody died, even if it was right in front of you: just took him away and then said he'd been moved to another barracks.

Of course trainin' wasn't the only way that boys died. Some boys killed themselves, and some boys were murdered. Suicide was wrong 'cause then there was one less soldier, and if you tried it and failed, well, they'd take you away and nobody knew what they did, but you never came back. Murder was - well, it was bad, but if the murderer was smart, he could get away with it. Even sorta get rewarded for it. But if he got into his head to kill too often, he was goin' to wake up with all the boys' hands holdin' him down, while someone sat on his chest and strangled him with a bootlace.

Then we'd tie the bootlace to the edge of the bunk, and shove him off to dangle over the edge, and say it was suicide. You don't need to ask me how I know this. I was - I don't even think I was eight. I didn't do the stranglin', but I helped.

 

{break}

 

Once I got big enough to go into the Trainee Barracks, it was better. I got more food, and more clean water. The trainin' was easier now, because I was bigger and stronger. I trained and worked and ate with the same boys, all the time. I knew I was goin' to be fightin' beside these boys in just a few years, and die beside them. They were everyone I was ever goin' to know.

I ended up lookin' like most of the other boys, I guess, when I stopped gettin' taller. Maybe I had a bigger chin than some of 'em, but I had the same brown hair and brown eyes as most everyone else when I looked into the worn metal mirror that was all we had in the lav. Just average looking, I guess. Nothin' special, still.

I learned everything there was to learn about killin'. I could kill a man with a gun, or a sword, or a spear, or a rock if it was heavy enough. I could probably kill a man with this microphone right here, if I wanted to.

Trainin', trainin', trainin', that's all I did. And the thing I hated the most was practicin' for the Victory Parade. They drilled us all in it over an' over, how we'd hold our weapons and march through the Dome when the War was over. How the civilians would all line up and sing to us, those civilians we were dyin' to protect. Those civilians we never saw. And every minute we practiced I'd hate inside; I hated the stupid-arse Victory Parade, because I was sure I'd never live to see that victory.

Oh sure, they told me, told all of us over and over again, that we were the generation that was goin' to win the war. I didn't believe them. I didn't believe nothin' after a while, except that if I didn't learn right I'd die sooner rather than later.

I remember I was scared to death when I started growin' hair on my body, until one of the older boys told me what it was. Once I snuck under a bunk with two other boys, and they passed around a picture of what they said was a woman. She was curvy and soft-looking, and she was all different between her legs. It really didn't make me feel anything, but I pretended. That was what you were s'posed to do. I think.

I never saw a woman but in that picture. Women stayed in Women's Quarters, behind layers and layers of walls and defences, makin' babies all the time. They had to: even inside the Dome there were s'posed to be poisoned sectors, where if you just walked into 'em you'd curl up and die.

 

{break}

 

I went outside for the first time when I was fourteen, I think. First time outside, first time with a gun with live ammunition without a Teacher at my back, first time in a full uniform. First time I killed a man. He just came up over the side of a trench, and I turned and shot before I even recognised he was Thal. He fell back, like I'd slapped him away, and when I went and looked half his face was gone. Like I'd slapped it off.

Outside was horrible. I felt like the top of the world had gone away. I'd never seen the sky before, and having nothin' over my head, and worse, a moving nothin' when the clouds blew over, was like having the top of your eyes go blind. You'd keep huntin' with your eyes for the ceiling, but it wasn't there. It would never be there again.

The night after I killed, some of the older squad boys brought a little blood from the dead Thal, and rubbed it on my face, and had me say a prayer to the God of War. They made me promise that I would serve Him, that I would let myself be filled by Him if He chose me to be the one who would burn all of Skaro with war.

I said the prayer. I would have agreed to anything they said. They frightened me like the Teachers never had. Those boys were only a little older than me, only a few months on th' battlefield, and their faces were blank and their eyes were too flat in their heads, like the eyes of dead men, like the one blue eye of the dead Thal. And the blood stank on my face.

The God never touched me, not that I know of. But I wasn't one of those who made a trance or a dance out of killin'. I wasn't the religious type.

 

{break}

 

War is mud. Mud and blood, heat and cold, tiredness that hollows you out like rot, or maggots in a wound. War is boredom and terror, all in one.

I could tell you where and when I fought - sometimes. Sometimes you didn't know, they just pointed you at a hole or a hill or a pile of rock and said "Defend that!" or "Take that!" Some places I fought were famous battles, most were not. It was all fightin' over piles of mud, so far as I could see from where I was. But I remember countin' the days and thinkin' I'd been in that mud for three months, and I was still alive. I didn't know how many men I'd killed; too many? Not enough? Forgot to notch my dagger pommel, to keep count. Math ain't my strong point.

I didn't know where my next meal would come from. Sometimes I woke up and I barely knew my own name and number. But I kept on marching, kept on fighting, kept on diggin' and hidin' and killin' in the mud.

The last part of the war, the last that I was in anyway, there was eleven of us and the Lieutenant. Now I know what you're thinkin', you're thinkin', eleven led by a Lieutenant? Well, there'd been one hell of a fight to try and get control of one of the passes that went through the Drammankin Mountains to the Thal territory on the other side. If we controlled the pass, we could keep more soldiers from coming through, and keep enemy soldiers from retreatin' through it.

So we fought, and died. Lots of us died, from bullets, from spears, from thrown rocks or just from turnin' around at the wrong time and gettin' a knife in the back. I was a Corporal by then, which just meant I'd survived my first year and wandered into the right trench to get a bit of paper and a metal tag to hang on my shoulder. It didn't mean nothin' to me. I knew I wasn't goin' any higher. I didn't have any great skills that would let me be promoted to a rank where I'd ever get out of the Wastelands, and into Central Command. That was for the super-soldiers, the ones who could lead and speak and inspire all at once. The only man I ever met like that was Brigadier Ravon, and I did hear he finally made General and got out, got through it, alive. Good for him.

But the Lieutenant rounded up a bunch of men in that battle I was tellin' you about, and said we had 'secret orders' to go on an 'advanced reconnaissance mission.' And he was a Lieutenant, so we jumped to it and did what he said. Especially since what he said was we should head away from the Wastelands, along the base of the mountains. Further away from the Dome, and Command, but also further away from the war, and that was fine by us.

The mountains meant that there was some water to be found, usually, and the Lieutenant knew how to find military cairns, with hidden supplies. We emptied them out, and kept moving.

Late at night, after the other men had curled up to sleep, you'd see the Lieutenant sittin' by the fire, shuffling sheets of orders in his hands. We knew he wasn't gettin' no new orders, that it was all a lie. That he'd cracked, just like so many other men had cracked; but he had the authority to run away from the war, and enough of us to cover his arse.

But he covered us, as well. He was a good Lieutenant. He took care of us, made sure we rested and set the proper watches, and could tell when someone had fallen behind or hurt themselves before anyone else would notice. Saved my life, at least once that I remember, when a varda plant jumped at me and he was the one who pulled me away.

We might have kept going forever, I think. Or maybe until we got to the ocean, which I've never seen and still can't really imagine - water so far you can't see across it - but then one night, as we were getting settled in to sleep, a boy stepped into the light of the fire.

Every weapon snapped up and pointed at him, but none of us fired. He was short, wearin' a gas mask and a Kaled courier's uniform, and that uniform was as fresh as if he'd just stepped out of the Command Complex. But he must have been out in the Wastelands for days, maybe weeks, to reach our position.

He didn't say nothin'. He just handed the Lieutenant an official orders packet, and then sorta faded away into the dark.

The Lieutenant chewed out the sentries right proper, but they swore up and down that nobody had gone past 'em. That night, I think we all lay awake and watched the Lieutenant look at the new orders. A couple of times I thought he was goin' to drop them in the fire; and a couple of times I wished that he would. Because what could those orders be, except that we should either go back into battle - or go back to the Dome for court-martial, and a noose?

When the sun was up enough, the Lieutenant called us all together and said we were headin' away from the mountains. Away from Thal territory. Back towards the Kaled Dome.

"I s'pose that's in the orders?" sneered Clir; he'd always had a hard spot for the Lieutenant, gave him lip whenever he thought he could.

The Lieutenant bit his own lip, then took the orders from his pocket, and held them out for Clir to see. Clir slung his rifle and looked, so we did the same, crowdin' close.

It was official orders, all right, for the Lieutenant and all of us, by name. But the thing was, that couldn't be right. The Lieutenant had picked us all up in the middle of a battle, in the heat of it, so how could all our names be here on the Orders sheet? How had they found out who we were an' where we were?

Didn't matter to us, though: it was orders. And the Lieutenant believed in them, and we did because we believed in him. That's the sort of man he was, the way I like to remember him.

We moved towards the Dome for a couple of days, sometimes crossing our own tracks. The weird thing was, though, we didn't see any Thals. Or any Kaleds. Or any Mutos, even. No soldiers, not even that many fresh dead. And there was no noise of shellin', no fresh stink of gas in the air, no nothin'. Weird.

Once we came across a mine field, and we smelled it before we saw it; all the mines had been marked with paint, glowin' green like poison, and the paint stank like a wet-rotted corpse. So we went around it, and wondered who the fool was who'd gone into a mine field to mark 'em like that.

And once we waited in a trench for half a day it seemed, while the Lieutenant looked over one of our old cairns again and again and again. We'd opened it before, eaten all the food and taken the ammo. But now all the rocks were piled back up, neat as you please. Like it had been filled up again. Maybe. Or maybe a trap.

We ended up goin' past that cairn, although we were sore hungry right then, the kind of hunger where you can feel the sides of your stomach rubbin' up against each other like cold hands. But the Lieutenant didn't trust the cairn, so we went on by.

The next day, we woke up and we could see the Dome. Clir had been on watch; he said he could see it glow from the rising sun, before the sunlight even touched the ground. And moving towards us was another boy in a courier's uniform and a gas mask. He ran right out in the open, not duckin' or taking cover, and we were certain he'd stop a bullet half a hundred times. Maybe because it was all misty, nobody saw him to take him out. He ran up to the Lieutenant, handed him new orders and a bag of ration packets, saluted, then turned around and left.

There was something funny about the way he ran, but we didn't take time to talk about it: we fell on those ration packets, practically breathed 'em in, wrapper and all. Food pills never tasted so good, and there were sugar pills too. While we ate, the Lieutenant read the orders. Whatever he was readin' must have been more interestin' than food to him, but even then I wondered why his face just got longer and longer as he read.

When we were all done eatin', the Lieutenant rose and faced us. His face white like snow, and his lips barely movin' as he spoke.

"Fifteen minutes to wash up."

We looked at each other and swallowed. No reason t'wash unless we were goin' to be reviewed. So we took the last of our water and washed our faces, and Kallik passed around his razor and we got in a bit of a shave apiece. Our uniforms were pure filth, but we could at least scrape the mud off our insignia, get the worst of the clots off our boots. When we were as close to ready as we could manage, we fell in behind the Lieutenant, and we went in.

The area around the Dome was even quieter than the battlefield, but we thought we could see people movin' on each side of us through the mist, people in Kaled uniforms. The Lieutenant marched us right up to one of the main locks of the Dome, and it opened.

Inside there were some men, civilians, and a General with them, though I didn't know his face, just his uniform. There were guards against the wall, all of them wearin' gas masks. The Lieutenant saluted, and the General returned the salute.

"This is all your men?" the General asked, in a strong broad voice. You could see how he made General: built like a tank, sharp-eyed as any Elite. "Do you have any particular squad name? Or a group name?"

The Lieutenant said, "No, sir!" sharp-like.

The General spread his hands a bit, looked us over, and then told us all to go into the corridor. We did, all tight together like a knot, and found ourselves facin' a bunch more civilians. And also, and this is strange? I thought it was a bunch of tiny people first, until I saw it was children. Children and civilians, some of them with very long hair.

And they looked at us, and they smiled. Smiled with tears in their eyes, and they opened their mouths and they sang.

They sang, "Welcome home!" Just those two words, and I just fell. I fell like you'd kicked the legs out from me, or like my heart had just stopped beatin', because that's what they were goin' to sing to us at the Victory Parade, when the war was over.

When the war was over.

I've been blown over by grenades, I've been shot and punched and stabbed, but nothin' ever hit me the way those two words did.

There was a thud beside me, and I saw the Lieutenant stretched out on the floor, and somethin' go slidin' away from his hand. I thought he'd fainted, but then one of the guards shot Clir. He shot him with something like a tiny thick yellow arrow, and Clir fell over with a big smile on his face, even though the arrow hadn't gone in far enough to hurt him.

"Wha' was that?" I said; I was still sorta dizzy.

"Worth punchin' that-" mumbled Clir, and then he fell asleep right there. The arrow musta been drugged.. And I saw he must have belted the Lieutenant. Shit, that was a court-martial and an air dance, no mistake…

"Punched him just in time, it seems," said one of the civilians, steppin' up holding the thing that had slid out of the Lieutenant's hand. I could tell he was a civilian from the way he talked, all flat and the words sounded strange when he said 'em. "He was intending this for himself. I think," and he sighed with the Lieutenant's gun in his hand, "I think we need to hand him over to Medical, for the moment."

There was something funny about this civilian. He was wearin' long white robes, like a Councilman, but besides not havin' a Standard accent, his voice was weird, too high. There was somethin' wrong with the shape of his face, too. Not enough chin, or too flat, or something.

"Well then," he says, "shall we get you settled down for the day? Anyone have any wounds that need looking at?"

Nobody did, for once, not so much as a splinter. They took us to a medical room anyway, hooked us up to machines that scanned us. We didn't care, because while we were sittin' in those nice clean chairs they let us have everything we could eat - and I do mean everything. And water too. Then they let us take showers, with all the hot water we wanted, and soap and towels and everything. And then we each got a bunk that was warm and flat and dry.

This was heaven was the last thing I thought, before I fell asleep.

 


	2. Peace

The next day was the most important day of my life, although I didn't know it.

I woke up and sort of poked around; they'd bunked us in a nice place, clean white walls and floor, with little rooms all leadin' into one big room. The big room had a table, and a note sayin' that someone would be comin' for an orientation speech at nine hundred hours, and we should wait. And there was a big jar of food pills waitin', and glasses and water pitchers.

So we sat around, eatin' and talkin' a bit about what it all might mean. Most of us had slept like the dead, but Clir was as mean-eyed as ever, and the dark circles under those eyes made me think he might not have slept at all. Moam and Kallik were smug as assassins, of course: they looked like that whenever they got five minutes alone to bugger each other, let alone all night in a bunk.

Well nine hundred hours came 'round, and a man came in, a civilian of course, with a big folder under his arm. Behind him was another one of those weird Dome guards wearin' the white robes; this one was wearin' a gas mask and carryin' some sort of gas canister on his back.

Now we didn't like the looks of that. Not at all. We got up and started backin' away from the table, and the civilian held out his hands.

"Gentlemen, please!" he said, makin' little come-here motions with his fingers. "My name is Psych Tech Cag. I'm not here to hurt you."

"None of us need psychin'," snapped Clir, and we all made noises t'show we agreed. We all knew what happened to men who went to the techs: some of them never came back, and some of them came back like dead men who just happened to still be able to walk.

"No, no, I'm just here for the orientation. I promise. All right?" He had a sort of smooth voice, and he was pretty clearly scared to death of us. You could tell by the way his eyes looked. He pulled out a chair and sat down, and kept both hands flat on the table in front of him. The folder was beside him. And he just sat there and waited.

One by one, we got sick of waitin' and came and sat down. We were all pretty sure that if we didn't do what he said, things wouldn't go so good for us. 'Sides, we were soldiers, we were s'posed to follow orders. It might have been as long as five minutes before I sat at the table.

"What's he there for?" Clir demanded, still standin' and pointin' at the guard. "Why can't he wait outside?"

Cag smiled and it made him look more scared. "We just want to make sure that there isn't going to be any trouble. If there is trouble, well, the gas is non-lethal." Which sorta made sense, because if it was lethal Cag wouldn't be sitting here without a mask. Clir didn't look too happy with that, but he sat down at last.

Cag smiled and told us, "First things first. A Solstice Treaty was signed three weeks ago, between the Thal and the Kaled people. The governments have mutually agreed to a Peace Accords document and ratified it. The war is over."

We all just stared at him. He might as well have said that the sky was goin' to be pink from now on, or that one plus one was now officially five.

"The war is over," he repeated. "For good. You can see the footage of the Accords being signed, watch the troops being withdrawn-

"The Thals will march in and wipe us out!" I said, half-shoutin'. They'd taught us always that if we retreated it would be the end.

"Impossible," Cag made more hands-down gestures, "the Thals are sealing the passes through the Drammankin Mountains with explosives. They're disarming. No, the war is really over."

We just sat there and stared at him, and it was Clir of all people who asked in a tiny voice, "But what are we going to do now?"

Cag opened one of the folders beside him and pulled out a bunch of little flat booklets, with pictures on them. "We've printed up some basic orientation material. In short: you are guaranteed shelter, food and medical treatment in the Dome. You have the right to muster out if you want to, or stay on-"

"Oh sure," Clir growled. "And why would you want us to stay on, if the war's over?"

Cag blinked, and looked sad for a second. "I'm sure you've met soldiers who were - unbalanced on the battle field? Mentally unstable?"

We all rolled our eyes at that. Sure we did, we knew the screamers and the shakers and the babblers, we served with 'em every day, and tried to hide from them at night.

"Well, all those men are in here now. With us. Anyone who wants to join the military branch of Dome Security will be welcomed with open arms."

It was Kallik who asked the next question. He was sittin' right next to Cag, and he took one of the booklets off the pile and looked at it.

"What's with this man on the cover?" he asked. "He's all weird-lookin'." He held it out so that we could see that the cover had a coloured drawing of a person with really, really long hair, and a long white robe, which sorta looked like the robe of the guard who was leanin' against the wall. There were words over the person's head, 'WELCOME HOME'.

I'm sure anyone who's listenin' to this will think we were a right bunch of fools: but we'd never seen anything but men all our lives, growin' up. And we all knew that there was only one Kaled woman born for every ten men: that's why they had to be kept away from everythin', kept safe, else one blast could wipe them all out and then no more babies, no more soldiers, and the Thals would roll right over us.

"That is," Cag coughed and started over. "Supreme Commander Davros," we all jumped a bit at that name, "has created a new class of civilians, who are aiding in both security and scientific ranks. They are called the Daughters of Skaro."

Kallik stared at the drawing, bug-eyed. "That's a woman?" he finally said. "There's real women here, I mean, out of the Quarters? That cain't be safe."

"There are new advances in radiation and chemical decontamination. The Dome is safe, and grows safer by the hour. The Daughters are safe," and Cag dropped his chin and stared at us grim-like, "and by Davros' orders they are to be kept safe. The penalties for harassing one of them are - severe."

Kallik looked at the booklet, and then he looked at the guard against the wall. Then he looked back and forth again. His mouth hung open as he stared. We were all starin' now. A woman, a real woman right here with us.

He - she, she tilted her head so's that she could see us all out of the gas mask lenses. And then she just up and peeled the whole thing off, slung it over the back of the empty chair beside Cag, and sat down. And we all stared at her.

A woman. There were little red dents on her face around her eyes and chin from the gas mask, and her face was sweaty, and her long dark hair was all messed-up from the gas mask straps, but - she was there, a woman, not a man and yet just the same, somehow. And she was sorta beautiful, but not in the normal way, not the way men are. Of course.

"Welcome home," she said, and her voice was different, sweet and - and different. Like the civilian from yesterday who took the Lieutenant's gun, and her face was the same too. "My name is Fortieth Security Assistant called Fousea."

We all sat and stared at her. Her hands were different from a man's, not as square, and the fingers seemed longer. Her chest was curvy instead of flat, and she - she must have that different woman part, right there, under her robes.

I blushed. All the other men were kinda lookin' down at the table as well. We didn't know what the hell to do.

"Psych Tech Cag has covered the basics," she went on in that different voice. "Reading the orientation booklets will be very useful to you; please help each other if there are any words you don't understand. There are orientation films as well, we show them hourly. Would you like to go see them?"

We just kinda looked at her, and she smiled, and with that smile I would have done anythin' she asked. It was really strange; I can't even describe it. It was like - I knew how to take orders from officers, and the Elite in the Dome, but she was sorta suggestin' instead of orderin' and that made it different.

Somehow we all agreed to go and see the films, except maybe Clir who was bein' stubborn as usual.

"What if I don't want to see no film?" he said.

"Then you will find things very confusing here," Fousea said in a way that sounded a little mean. "Many things have changed. But if you need to stay in here and recover first, you are welcome to do so for as long as you like."

"What if I wanna stay in here forever?"

"Then you can stay. You will have shelter, food, and if you get sick we'll give you treatment." She tilted her head again, and we watched as her hair started to just slide over her shoulders, like grass in t'wind, all long and dark. "But you may get very bored."

Clir was starin' at Fousea like she was an enemy. I'd seen him make that face before jumpin' on Thals from ambush. "And what if I want to-" Clir stood up a little in his chair, and her hand flashed to a metal button on her backpack. And we all froze.

"If I have to gas this room, I will," she said. "We'll all be unconscious in a very few seconds. And when you wake up, you will have this orientation again, and I will not be present."

Moam reached up and pulled Clir back into his seat. "He'll be good," he said, and looked at Clir in a way that made it clear that he'd better be good. Clir just sorta frowned in his chair.

Fousea moved her hand off the button, and pulled out a can with some coloured label on it. "I'm afraid we don't have much to offer you to celebrate your return, but we do have a can of perro fruit. You could split it eleven ways-"

Perro fruit. I'd never tasted it, just heard about it, and they'd made it sound like it tasted better than sex felt. But the first words out of my mouth weren't about that. Instead I said real fast, "Twelve ways."

Fousea looked at me, and I sorta jumped inside - she was looking right at me, she was seeing me - but I went on. "Twelve ways. One for the Lieutenant."

"Lieutenant?" asked Cag.

"He isn't quartered here," said Fousea, and her face was all sad for a second. "He is - a very unwell man, but I'm sure he would know and appreciate it if we brought him-"

"Shit on the Lieutenant," said Clir, nasty as ever. "What'd he ever do for me? I'll take his share-" and he reached for the can, and we piled on him. Just like that.

It was just reflex; Clir was out from his chair and rolling on the floor, breakin' free and puttin' his heels up, and we were comin' after him, with chairs or fists or just ready to kick him to death, and Fousea shouted, "Stop! Stop this now!" And we all stopped, standin' around him on the floor.

She came marchin' over to us, her face white and mean. "Private Clir," she said, in a tight voice, "is there any debt between you and these men?"

"What?" He wasn't so stupid as to take his eyes away from us; he just lay there on his back,-half-rolled up to protect his gut and his heels ready to kick.

Fousea's eyes went over us sharp-like. "Does Clir owe any of you anything? Is there any great favour that he owes you, or vice versa?"

We all sort of looked at each other and came up with no.

"Very well." She turned and went to the wall; there was a little cable there, a metal one, runnin' along the seam, and she pulled it loose and stuck it against her head for a second. Cag was standin' besides the table, and she waved her hand and he sat right down - it looked like the Daughters could give orders, at least to psych techs. Then the door opened and two guards came in, Dome Security men, and damn big ones too.

"Private Clir is to be housed elsewhere, please," Fousea said. "We will have his personal record reviewed, and see if we can't quarter him with someone he knows."

Clir just slumped all of a sudden, all of the fight runnin' out of him. "Everyone I know is dead," he spat.

She looked at him with her eyes too wet, like she was goin' to cry. "I hope not, I truly do," she said to Clir, as he gathered up his kit and marched out with the guards. They hadn't touched him up with a truncheon or nothin', so maybe he was just goin' to be moved.

Fousea opened a storage box in one of the walls, and took out bowls and spoons. They must have been - what's the word - antiques, because ever since the war people just ate food pills, and you don't need a spoon for those. She had a little can opener and she sliced the can open and split it between the bowls. When she was done, she showed us that there was one portion still inside the can, and put it away. For the Lieutenant.

Perro fruit sure don't taste as good as sex feels; but it was real good. Really good, and somethin' I'd never tasted before in my life. For the rest of my life, I think, every time I taste perro fruit I'm goin' to think of the Peace.


	3. Work

We all read the booklets together, helpin' each other with some of the hard words. It told all about the Dome was now, how we could live here and be safe, and how the Elite were going to make everything better outside, get rid of all the poisons. We went to the films, of course, and watched as the Peace Accords were signed, by the Kaled and the Thal Council both. An' they showed up footage of Davros, the Supreme Commander, as he somehow moved his brain out of the ruined body we'd all seen in films - blind and scarred, half a man really- into a new, healthy body.

Now that was a hard thing to believe. But Cag told us how the Daughters could move their thoughts from body to body, with little metal disks that were put in their heads. And how only certain sorts of minds could do that, so they couldn't just put all the wounded into new bodies.

The wounded - well, of course, for some of them the wounds were in their brains.

I went to see the Lieutenant. He seemed fine, except that he was tied to the bed. An' when I untied him to give him the perro fruit, he took the can away from me an' tried to cut his throat on the sharp edge of the lid. But someone heard me yellin', and there was a poof of smoke - gas I mean - and we both went down.

When I woke up, the Lieutenant was back in bed, tied down, an' there was a doctor sealin' the cut on the side of his throat.

"What's wrong with you?" I yelled, not thinkin' that maybe I shouldn't get so mad at a superior officer and a sick one at that. "Why're you doin' this to yourself? Why are you draggin' me into it?" Because it had hurt, me bringin' him the can as a present and him tryin' to kill himself with it.

"I swore," the Lieutenant said, and then went back to starin' at nothin', ignorin' me and the doctor.

"He's sworn an oath to the God of War," the doctor said in a soft voice. "To give up his life, so long as all his men can be safe. Now you are, so-"

"But that don't mean kill yourself! That's stupid! You can keep livin', if the God wants your life He'll just take it!" I said, talkin' and spittin' at the same time. But the Lieutenant didn't seem to hear me.

I sat there with the can of perro fruit, without the lid now, and a spoon, and fed him. He ate, and kept tryin' to get me to untie him. He ordered, he sweet-talked, he yelled, and I just kept feedin' him the perro fruit, and cryin' inside, where he couldn't see. Outside I was happy and tryin' to tell him that I was all right, but inside I was cryin', believe me.

They say he'll get better. That the psych techs will give him real therapy, not just like what they used to do. That he'll find a way to work through his oath, keep his honour and use his life for something. I hope so.

 

{break}

 

Things were easier without Clir. We none of us had anyone else to be with, so we thought we'd all stay together.

They gave lists of things we could do in the Dome - exercise times, dining hall schedules, and film times, and other things. None of us much wanted anything to do with exercise - we just got out of the Wastelands, runnin' for our lives all day and night, we didn't want to exercise no more - but Kallik went one mornin', just to see what it was like.

He came back all sweaty and with a weird smile on his face. He talked about the group exercises and the strange new exercise machines, and the therapy machines for wounded men who needed special exercises. "And the women were rather pretty too," he said, and smiled again.

You can bet we were all at exercises the next mornin'. And there were women there, doin' exercises, but there was a big pane of glass inbetween us, and guards with gas and dart weapons. Kallik hadn't mentioned that part. But we could look at them, and they could look at us.

They were - different from men. Just a different shape all over. They were all wide 'cross the hips, and their arms weren't as thick as a man's. And they had breasts. But the exercises they were doin', they all had to do with their stomach and their back, all the baby-carryin' and baby-pushin' muscles, and you wouldn't believe how perfect some of them were. They were like - you could see every muscle, every line of 'em, under the thin exercise clothes, and see the muscles movin' across their stomachs, how they'd flex their back muscles doin' lifts and it was - well, I could watch them exercise all day.

Of course some of 'em were all round and pregnant, that was the word, with babies inside. And they did their own sort of exercises. Some of them were really big. It made us all realise how hard it must be to have babies - "like swallowing an artillery shell, carrying it for nine months, and then shitting it out" was how one of the exercise instructors put it.

And some of the men with us, they were Elite men, Dome workers. Not soldiers. They weren't as tough as us, and we could outpace them easy. An' I thought for sure there'd be fights, 'cause in the trenches there were always soldiers gripin' about how the ones in the Dome never fought and always got enough to eat. But really, when you were right there beside 'em, they were just men, that's all. They sweated like us, panted like us. And they talked about how they were jealous - jealous, crazy as that sounds - that we got to fight and they just got to push papers 'round. So there was a lot to talk about, while we were halted for water and such, and the only fights got stopped pretty quick.

Of course you might think that some men would do somethin' rude with women there, but the only time someone dropped his pants and started jackin' it in front of the glass, all of the women just gathered round on their side and stared, like they were watching some sort of animal do tricks. And we all stood behind him and sort of growled that he'd better not let the side down, and, well, he finished. Barely.

So there was exercisin' and eatin' and all the sleep I wanted. And I had time to talk to the other men, soldiers and Dome men too, time to sit and think, time all for me, that no officer would take away. None of us were actually mustered out yet, we were all on leave, but I wasn't really plannin' on becoming a career man. Not at this late date. Not with the war over.

It was takin' time but I was really starting to believe it now. Now that there was no new wounded coming in, an' you could look outside and see the Wastelands all empty. The war was really over.

Cag came, and gave me a paper showin' everyone I served with, an' where they were now. Most of 'em were dead, of course. Or MIA. But one of my old friends from the trainee days, Mayt, had made it; so we met up.

That was a great time, that was. The Daughters had found everyone alive who'd been at the Battle of Red Ness - did I say I was in that one? - and put on the schedule for us to meet at a single place and time, in a big room with lots of space for talkin'. The room was a lot bigger than the number of men in it, which was awful sad. A lot of men died at Red Ness. But we lived, and we all talked and remembered, an' there was food and drink and music. We cried a lot and we hugged a lot, and we danced.

There weren't any women at that, except for some Daughters who gave out the drinks, and guards. That was all right. I'd spent all my life with men, and tell the truth, the Daughters were sort of strange. They all looked alike, and they all knew what the others had said or done. So when you talked to one of them about something, you could talk to any of them about the same thing the next day, and they'd know everything you said. Davros sure made them well. But strange, for all that.

Anyway, I wasn't rushin' to take the Sexual Basics course, which you needed to take if you wanted to go to dances with the regular Kaled women from the Quarters. I was more interested in resting and eating, and deciding what I'd do the rest of my life.

 

{break}

 

I think I'd been back in the Dome almost a month when Kallik woke me up one night; he tapped the leg of the bunk and jumped back as I snapped up, reachin' for a weapon that wasn't there. We all did that.

"What's on?" I asked.

Kallik was grinnin' like he was scared. "Moam an' I were lookin' over the rules that got wiped out by the Rollback. You know, all those stupid-arse war rules, and we saw that there's no rules against bein' married anymore." He was grinnin' so hard that he had to stop for a moment and relax his face to talk. "So Moam an' I, we're goin' to do it. Have a wedding. Tonight. Could you be in t'Circle?"

They'd saved my life any number of times, so I agreed.

Late that night we all snuck out to an empty room that was big enough, one with lights that worked. Kallik and Moam had finger rings for each other, probably loot; nobody had been able to find a sword, so we were going to use a trench knife.

We none of us were all the way sure of how it worked, but we sort of formed ourselves into a Circle, holdin' hands, with Kallik and Moam in the middle. The man with the rings was on the outside, along with the sword-bearer who was actually just the knife-bearer.

So Kallik and Moam started swearin' their oaths to each other, and man, it was strong stuff. All about how long they'd loved each other, how many times they'd wanted to spend the rest of their lives together an' now they would, how they'd be willing to die for each other. And they both had like practiced it, because it all sounded really great, like a real speech from a newsreel. I guess we were all payin' a bit too much attention to them, because the Security patrol was on top of us before any of us knew it.

It was all men, worse luck, no Daughters. The man in charge had this really cold look on his face as he eyed us all, the ones in the Circle and the ones outside.

"What are you doing out of your quarters?" he said with a frown.

"We're getting married," Kallik said.

"You can't," the man shot back. "Regulations."

"Not anymore," said Moam, lookin' calm but too sweaty around the brow, if you know what I mean. That look that could turn into fear or fightin' at any moment. "They rolled all that back, and there's no rules restricting it. We can get married."

"He's right, Hent," said a woman's voice. It was one of the Daughters, and she stepped out from behind one of the patrolmen and they all jumped like she'd stepped out of thin air. "Is there a problem?"

This man Hent gave a real nasty dressing-down of all of us, all without even lookin' at us or knowin' our names. But we all put our chins up, and held our hands tight, and stared at 'em all. There weren't no curfew anymore, and there weren't no marriage regulations, and if anyone deserved to be married it was Kallik and Moam. So we were there, ready to fight it out if we had to, and the patrolmen who had snuck up on us with Hent were fingerin' their truncheons in a way that said they'd be goin' for their sidearms next.

After Hent had run dry, the Daughter looked at us. She came up to the Circle - she didn't touch it, just stared at the two men gettin' married.

"And how long have you two been wanting to do this?" she asked, calm-like.

"A long time," said Kallik. "Years," said Moam.

"All right." She turned around and made a wave with her hand, and more Daughters came out of the darkness, some in masks and some without, and there were more of them than there were of the Security patrol. More than there were of us, really. And there were Daleks with 'em too. The poor knife-bearer was lookin' really scared now, he was s'posed to fight off monsters that weren't real, like Hunger and Death and Fear, not fight Dome Security and the Daughters with just a trench knife.

"Well, don't just stand there, Hent," the Daughter said. "Get them a sword."

"A what?" Hent said, his eyes all wide, and we were all wide-eyed too.

"A sword, Hent, a sword. Long sharp thing for sticking in people," she said. "We've got piles of them around here, and we certainly don't need them for fighting. You can't expect these men to get married with a trench knife, can you?"

Hent just stared at her. So she pulled a ring of keys out from somewhere and tossed 'em to one of the other Daughters. She grabbed 'em out of the air and ran off.

"An outer circle!" she shouted and clapped her hands, and all the Daughters joined hands outside our Circle, and they were all smilin' at us like we were the greatest men in the world. And then they sang for us. It was a song all about love, and none of us knew the words but we all listened. I thought it was really pretty, and when it was over the other Daughter came up, pantin', with a sword over her shoulder in a sheath.

She went up to the sword-bearer with his trench knife, and carefully drew the sword from the sheath. It was real old-lookin'; the hilt was fancy twisted metal that looked like vines, a sword like I'd never seen before.

"Sergeant," she said - all the Daughters knew the ranks of all the soldiers who came home, knew all our faces - "this sword was carried by General Solz - at least that's what the plaque in the museum said. I charge you to bear it well."

The Sergeant was all eyes at that. He stuffed his trench knife away careless-like, and took the sword real carefully, with both hands. Damn thing must've been centuries old, but it still looked sharp enough to cut hairs with.

"This is preposterous!" snorted Hent.

"I hope that you are not here as a Demon," the Daughter snapped, and Hent backed off as the sword-bearer looked at him. See, from what I knew about a wedding, the sword-bearer is s'posed to protect the ones gettin' married from Demons who are people who dress up as monsters. An' I wasn't quite sure, but I thought that he was allowed to stick people who showed up to make trouble too.

The couple weren't taking any chances; they rushed through the rest of their vows, put on their rings, cut their hands on the sword and joined 'em, and they were married. The Daughters gave a big cheer, and we joined in. Then they brought out drink and food from who knows where and played music for us, and we danced and we sang dirty songs, and then we rolled up Kallik and Moam in a blanket and shoved them into their bunk room by themselves, and stood around outside laughin' until they threw the blanket out and told us to all go away and let them get on with it.

It was a swell party, really.

And here I've talked all this time, and I never even talked about the Daleks at all! Not till now. Well, the Daleks were these inventions of Davros, so far as we knew: man-sized metal tanks with weapons built in, that had little creatures inside. But you never saw the creatures. They talked in raspy voices, and they shouted like you wouldn't believe when they got pissed off. And they could paralyse you with their rayguns - or worse. But they didn't have to do worse too often. They were too scary. They patrolled with the Security teams, and when someone came out of the Wastelands too wild-eyed to speak it would be the Daleks who would clamp down on 'im, hold him until he could be darted. Nothin' you could do would so much as scratch a Dalek's metal case. Maybe the super-weapons you heard about in the newsreels could hurt them, the disintegrator ray or the amnesia bomb, but we didn't have nothin' like that. So the Daleks were safe from us.

 

{break}

 

Well, after a while I told Cag that I wanted to muster out, and he said all right. I saw a Brigadier who signed all the papers and shook my hand and told me I'd always be welcome back. His hand was sort of shaky in mine, like he was tired from shakin' hands too many times.

So I got some civilian clothes, which felt all wrong on me. Then I had to figure out what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Sure, sittin' and eatin' had its merits, but - y'unnerstand, I never had any idea that I could do anything but soldier, when I was a boy. Now that I had the chance, I wanted to try out other stuff and see what I liked.

There was this thing called work experience: you could do a job for a few days, and if you liked it you could stay, and if you didn't you could go do somethin' else. That sounded just right for me, so I signed up. They had me do a whole bunch of tests, and made this thing they called a personality wheel - a big circle full of colours. They said they could tell all sorts of things about me from those colours, about what sort of job would make me happy.

Of course, I didn't know that the Daughters would assign me to the most important job in the world first thing.

They took me to a great big room that had a sort of funny smell. Not a bad smell, just different. People were walkin' up and down the room, back an' forth. One of the Daughters came up to me and smiled, and gave me a little round soft bundle like the other people were carryin'. "You can just walk up and down here," she said. And I looked down at the bundle, and I saw that it was a baby.

A baby, a little person. I'd never seen a baby before. It had hardly any nose yet, and it was making little gurgle noises like it was upset. So I started walkin' like the Daughter said, back and forth, and the baby got quiet and seemed to be starin' up at me.

I stared back. The baby was so tiny, it didn't weigh no more than a rifle it seemed. I couldn't imagine that this would grow up and be a person, a man. I could barely imagine this bein' a little boy someday.

I must have been walkin' back and forth for a long time, and the baby had fallen asleep I think, just lyin' there with its eyes closed, when a grey-haired man came up to me, holdin' a baby in his arms as well.

"How is she?" he asked.

My mouth fell open with a crack you could hear. I thought I felt my skin crawl right off my bones, I was that scared.. A girl baby? They handed me a girl baby?

"She?" I squeaked out.

"Yes, the girls have stripes on the edges of their blankets," he said. Then he must've seen the look on my face. "What's wrong?"

"It's - I can't have a girl!" The baby woke up when I said that, and started to wriggle a bit: I was scared of holdin' her too tight and scared of holdin' her too loose.

"Easy, easy! Just keep holding her like you are, and she'll be fine. I'm Gelc, by the way."

"Trilt, C-, um, 45618677," I said, stoppin' myself because I wasn't a Corporal no more, really. "Are you sure it's all right that I carry - her?"

"Yes, of course it is," he said with a smile. "You wouldn't be here if the Daughters didn't trust you." How they could trust me I don't know, but the baby was lyin' still now and just drippin' a bit from the mouth area.

"Is it s'posed to leak like that?" I asked Gelc; we were walkin' side by side now, and his baby was a solid lump of sleep.

"From which end?"

"What?"

"Babies don't know how to use the toilet," he explained. "They'll be taught that when they get bigger, along with speech and counting and everything else."

"Oh. So it's all right if they just drool a bit?"

"She'll be fine." Gelc leaned over and smiled that same smooth smile at the baby. "They'll all be fine now."

 

{break}

 

Well, walkin' with babies was nice all right, but it gave me the shivers. So I tried other jobs. Garbage pit cleanin'; you would not believe some of the stuff people used to throw away! There was machinery, and tools, and all sorts of stuff down there. And there was repair work on buildings that were fallin' over, there was talkin' to children, not trainees anymore but just children, and tellin' them about the war (the shit they stuffed into those boys' heads was goin' to take a lot of flushin' out to remove, we all knew that), and there was lots of work in warehouses, countin' what was there and writin' it down. I wasn't too good at writin' so that wasn't for me. So I kept doin' work experience, tryin' out new things, meetin' new people.

 


	4. Life

After a while I thought it was time I learned to read and write better, so I asked if I could take classes. And sure, there were classes and they were real hard, but I learned fast. Maybe it was the new instructors, who urged us on to learn as much as we could, instead of tryin' to keep us all learnin' at the same pace. I learned really fast. They said I had an 'aptitude' for math.

Finally I did take the Sexual Basics course, 'cause I heard you could get a really great book full of all sorts of naked pictures after you did it. And they were right. That book was amazing, and I never slept without it for a long time. The pictures were beautiful, and the words were all right too. Lots of useful things about sex and pairin' off with each other.

I'd never had sex with a woman, but I was starting to think that one of these days I just might. I was sorta thinkin' about that one day, not a workin' day, just wanderin' around and lookin' at the women as they walked by. All those beautiful women, right there where you could look at 'em. I wondered as I watched 'em, I mean - how you went about it. Was it really as simple as just talkin' to a woman, showin' her you were interested, and seein' if she was interested too?

Anyways, one of the Dome locks was there, and I stepped outside to look how far the fungus had spread. That was part of the Peace Accords, see: the Thals had built this fungus that was spreadin' all over the Wastelands, chewin' up the ground and gettin' rid of the poisons. Right now it looked like it had just snowed: everythin' was covered with great puffy lumps of the stuff. But the air was warm, and the fungus was warm too, and it was really strange to have it look like winter and be warm anyway.

So's I was just starin' around, wonderin' how deep this fungus was growin' into the ground, when I saw someone runnin' up the path towards me, with two Daughters chasin' behind him in their gas masks. The someone was wearin' what was left of a Kaled uniform, and his face was all wrapped up in bandages. He came up the dusted path between the fungus lumps (the dust kept the fungus from growin' over the path), and when he got close up to me he looked up and stopped, breathin' wrong.

By breathin' wrong, I mean his breath was all whistlin', puffin' out through the bandages over his face. He stared at me, with one eye that was all that you could see, and I stared back.

He was wearin' a courier's uniform, so filthy that you could barely tell that it was still cloth underneath the muck. The bandages on his face were dirty too, and there was somethin' wrong with his head under them. I mean it was like hollow on one side, and he didn't seem to have no chin, and maybe no eye on that side as well.

Well, it seemed pretty clear to me what had happened to him. A head wound, Level One if he didn't have no eye, and rather than come back to the Dome to be culled he'd stayed outside, hiding on the battlefield. I hated to think what it musta been like, huntin' up clean bandages and treatin' yourself out there, without any painkiller. He probably didn't even know the war was over.

"Hey," I said to him, "hey, it's all right."

He shook his head no, back and forth, and then jumped and turned as the Daughters came up behind him.

"Trilt," one of them said, "good. Could you help us? We need to get this man into Medical, clearly he's-"

The courier started gruntin' and wavin' his arms no; he looked ready to leap off the path and into the fungus. In fact he did lift one foot to do that, and I stepped forward to stop him.

"No, don't," I told him, "it'll eat up your clothes. Not you, it don't eat people, but it'll chew up your uniform for sure."

He was shakin' all over, and I could see how deep the bandages went in around where the bottom of his face was s'posed to be, and I wondered how t'hell he'd been eatin'. From how thin his arms were, I didn't think he'd been eatin' at all, maybe.

"Don't," I told him again. "Come inside. You can have food, water, anythin' you like, really. It's all right. It's over." And I held out my arms, makin' come-in motions with my hands. It was like lurin' some shell-shocked soldier out of the line of fire. The Daughters probably had dart guns and gas, but I knew them by now; they wanted people to do things by themselves if they could, and not have to force 'em.

The courier's one eye got even wider as another Daughter came up beside me, with a big clean glass of water in her hands. The glass was bright in the sunlight, an' little beads of water runnin' down the sides of it, and she held it out to him with a smile.

He'd probably never seen a woman before. And here was one, standin' right in front of him. And holdin' out water for him.

He put his head down, and grunted again, and gestured with his hands towards his bandages. An' then he felt around in his pocket, and came up with a cloudy worn plastic tube. He reached for the glass with one hand, and kinda cupped it against his chest, starin' at it, while he dropped the end of the tube into the water and poked the other end through a slit in his bandages.

Then he tried to drink, and he couldn't. He was makin' awful noises, but the water wasn't movin' into the tube at all. Squeezin' the glass tight against him with his filthy hands, starin' at it, and just tryin' to drink and he couldn't. It hurt just to watch, but I didn't know what I could do.

The Daughter did. She came forward and slowly pulled the end of the tubing loose from under his bandages - I swallowed when I saw how much came out, and figured how far it must be goin' into his throat. She put it in her own mouth and drew up the water, fillin' the tube; then she pinched it in t'middle, and helped him slide the end back under the bandages

That worked. He could get at the water now, and he - you could only see the one eye of his face, but that one eye spoke better'n a hundred words as he emptied that glass, I bet. How the water was cool and wonderful and clean, how he could finally drink his fill, how good it felt to have it trickle down his throat and into his stomach, how he had been so thirsty…

At last the glass was empty, and he made a little hurt noise.

"Do you want more?" the Daughter asked him.

He darted his head back an' forth like a scared animal. Lookin' around as best he can. Then he shook his head no, and started to make these rough noises, like k-, k-, k-, but he couldn't say no more than that.

I thought I knew what he was tryin' to say. "There's no more cullin'," I told him. "They don't cull anyone for Level One injuries anymore. Really. You can be fixed."

The Daughter nodded yes, and the courier closed his one eyes and shook. He dropped the glass and it landed in the mud by his boots. With this sort of shame to him, he put his hands over his hollowed-out face, covering it like it was somethin' horrible. Which it was, probably.

I couldn't think of how to get him into the medical section without him crazin' out on us. I was sure he'd heard the same stories about the culling ward that I had, and I couldn't think of anythin' we could do that he wouldn't see as trickin' him into goin' to be culled.

Then I thought of somethin'. There was a friend of Mayt's called Zo. He might be able to talk to him. So I whispered his name to the Daughter and she went off to find him, while I did everythin' I could to keep the courier from just runnin' off. I talked about the war bein' over, about the Peace Accords, about the mustering out, about the Daughters, about anything that came to my head.

I was thinking that he musta been hidin' close to the Dome somewhere, keepin' alive with stolen rations, and when the fungus started to grow over everything he'd panicked. He could've run farther away from the Dome, of course, but then there'd be no rations to find - and come to think of it, with a head like that, how was he gonna eat if he didn't have no food pills?

Then the Daughter came back with a man who must be Zo. I sorta jumped when I saw him, because he was unwrappin' bandages from around his head and he looked just plain awful underneath. All scars and tubes goin' into where his eyes were s'posed to be. The Daughter must have led him here, because he was still blind, just like Mayt had said. But-

"Hello," Zo said, holdin' his hand out. "Are you there?"

The courier made the little noise in his throat that seemed to be about all he could do.

"Well, I'm Private Zo. And I'm blind: caught a dose of blast acid just the wrong way. And so they took me out of the wards, and they did an eye graft."

The courier sorta tilted his head.

"Don't you understand?" Zo was smilin' and the skin under his eyes was all puffin' out as he smiled, from the cuts. "I was blind and they fixed me. It isn't healed yet, not all the way, but I'm going to see again. They will fix you too, I promise, please. Come inside." And he smiled even wider, an' held out his hands.

And after a long, long time, the courier reached back, and took those hands fumblin'-like, and just ducked his head. I didn't know if he believed us, or if he just wanted to die in bed instead of in a hole in the ground, but when Zo stepped backwards with the Daughter's help, the man came in with them.

I went along with them to the surgical ward. It was filled with men whose faces were puffy with surgery and healin'. Some of 'em had metal teeth, or artificial eyes, or other stuff: but they all came forward and talked to the courier, showed him where to stand for a sponge bath (his skin was the same green-grey as his uniform underneath it, it was so dirty and greasy), and helped hold him while his face was unbandaged. It was as bad as I thought: he pretty much didn't have a lower jaw anymore, or a tongue. But the Daughters were there, and the doctors too: they washed him, gave him stuff to numb him up, an' liquid food that he could swallow, and told him that it was safe, that it was over.

Afterwards I sat in a chair and just shook. That could've been me, I thought to myself, over and over again. If I looked over a trench at the wrong time, if a bullet had gone one way and not another, if I stepped on a mine. I might have been culled, killed by my own people, be dead and rottin', and never known the peace.

 

{break}

 

I could hardly believe it when they said it had been one year since the war ended. I had done more in that year I thought than I had in all the rest of my life before it. I certainly remembered a lot of it better. I wanted to remember it; my life now was like, well, it was like that one time I jumped into a lake in summer, with the warm water floatin' on top of cold, coverin' the cold, sealin' it away. The war was the cold, and my new life warm.

On the day of the Peace Accords anniversary, it seemed like every Kaled who could went outside to one of the great Dome entrances, and stood around it. There were men in propulsion chairs, men lying in powered beds even; only the ones who were in stasis, or who absolutely couldn't be moved, weren't there. Even the Lieutenant was there, with a medical attendant beside him to hold him and talk to him if he started to feel too bad. It was one of those days before winter where the air is cold and the sun is warm.

We all waited, and finally a woman came out of the entrance, all by herself, carryin' a little baby. She stepped up to a microphone that had been put up, an' when she spoke her voice echoed over us.

"My name is Sarra," she said, and smiled. She was cryin' and smilin' all at once. "And this is my son, Meman." She held the boy over her head with both hands, and he stared at us all like babies do. "And he is the first Kaled baby born after the War ended. May he never know war!"

And we all shouted out - the Daughters might have started it, but most of us joined in right quick, "May he never know war!"

And then more women came out, showin' off their babies. Babies who could live and grow old, who wouldn't die of bombs or poisons. Girl and boy babies, who'd never have to be soldiers. Beautiful babies, every one.

The women started to march around the Dome; there were Daughters and Daleks around them, and the men were there too, carryin' babies on their shoulders or in their arms, smilin' at them. We sang and we laughed, we danced even. Mayt was there, and we put our arms over each other's shoulders and walked together. We weren't walkin' all the way around the Dome, that would take hours. Some men said they would, just to show off, but most of us were goin' to go back inside at the next big entrance, and go to a big celebration in t'Dance.

"Welcome home, Trilt," Mayt said, and I stopped and I hugged him hard.

"Welcome home," I told him.

 

{break}

 

I still hadn't quite figured out what I wanted to do, even after a year, though. I knew that I liked travellin'; I'd been a part of the group that had been doin' surveying of what used to be a train track that ran all the way across the continent to the ocean on the other side. A lot of the track was gone near us, but once you got out far enough the original rail was still there, made outa some sort of metal that never rusted, stretching out in two straight lines as far as you could see. They said they would be rebuildin' it, to move food to the Dome.

But I still was goin' from work experience to work experience, tryin' out everything at least once. On one job I had, me and a bunch of men were up in one of the glass towers of the Dome, cleanin' the windows from the inside - some sorta chemical bomb had gone off, sabotage from a long time ago, and the windows were all dirty with old smoke. They said that once the smoke was cleaned off, there were plans to turn it into quarters, but I didn't think I'd want to live that far off the ground.

But once we had a few windows clear, I could see why you might want to live up high. It was really different, to look down and see the whole city under you: we almost spent more time lookin' than cleanin'. So we were all lookin' outside when a great red thing came soarin' past the window.

We all shouted and fell back. I thought it was the biggest bird I'd ever seen in my life, until it turned in the air an' flew back. Then I could see that it was like a flat tent, all cloth and poles and wires, with a big fan spinnin' behind it; and hangin' under the tent was a person, all dressed in red and wearin' goggles.

The flyin' person went round the building a few times, showin' off I guess, and we were dashin' around to watch, trippin' over each other and wavin' and laughin'. It was a woman: one of the Daughters in a flying machine. She finally wiggled the wings at us, like a wave, and then slid away through the air to land on the roof of another building.

We kept on cleanin' after that, but all the time I was thinkin' of the flying machines that used to be. Aeroplanes that could circle the world in hours, they used to have. Rockets. Spaceships, even.

And that evenin' I went to one of the Socialisation Dances, the ones that women went to as well as men. I dunno why, maybe I just wanted to see what it would be like.

Well, it was nice. There were drinks, and men to talk with and to dance with, and the women were there dancin' with themselves. One of the women came over and danced with me for a while. She was shorter than me, an' real pretty.

"What do you do?" she asked, and I told her all about the work experience, and about seein' the little glider flyin' around inside the Dome. I asked her if she knew about any other women flying, and she said no. She also said her name was Riss, an' I told her my name.

So we danced some more, and talked about stuff, and somehow we both ended up drinkin' a bit too much plus-plus, so we got cut off at the drink table. So she said, let's go outside and walk around.

Then she said she wanted to go sit down for a bit. And then she let me know that she was interested.

I dunno if I'm the kind of man who's ever goin' to be with a woman all the time, because all my friends are men, really. But Riss was different, and she was really friendly. She showed me what to do. And when I ended up peakin' too soon she just smiled, and asked me to kiss her where it would make her feel good, and I did, and then in a few minutes I was up for action again and she made me feel good.

So I don't what it's going to be for me next. Things are pretty all right, now. Got all the food an' sleep a man could want. I got people to talk to, people who can be my friends an' I don't have to be afraid of them dyin' in the next minute. But maybe there's more to life than that.

Maybe I'll see Riss again. Maybe I'll choose a new job, a career even, somethin' to do for the rest of my life. Somethin' special. Somethin' that can change the world, even.

Maybe someday I'll fly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NOTES ON THE TALE:  
> I always write about the superstars of Skaro, as it were - the Daleks, Davros, Nyder. It seemed only fair that we gets a view of what the end of the war would look like to an ordinary Kaled soldier.  
> This story was originally intended to cover several years, but I ended up cutting it back to the period between 'Dawn of the Daleks' and 'Hive of the Daleks.' There was a draft in which the wounded courier was one of the Spire Project subjects.  
> The slang in this is not gutter language (because why would people who lived in a Dome with central plumbing, and no rainfall except outside where the only buildings are in ruins, think of gutters?) but trench language, that of a Standard soldier.  
> Air dance = dancing on air; dancing from a noose; hanging


End file.
